Frontier

by Can Xue

  “Miss Liujin, your father and I have been friends for years.”

  He sat on the railing of the pavilion. He sat there lightly, as though he were a dark cloud.

  “Do you know how my dad has been doing recently?”

  “No. There are some things in this world that one never has to know. Your young friend is pressing on with his drill. His prospects are unlimited. Look: he’s flying!”

  Liujin didn’t see anything. Only darkness lay ahead.

  “How long ago did you build this hostel?”

  “A long time ago. Just think: in a place like this . . . at first it was lonely. No one came here. Later, it turned into this kind of place.”

  Liujin kept wanting to see the manager’s face, but for some reason, the moment her gaze rested there, she began feeling dizzy. She tried to cough off the dizziness, tried every way to concentrate. For a moment, she vaguely saw a farmer’s face. Smoke from burning wood seeped from his wrinkles.

  He stretched out his hand and plucked a little black turtle from the air.

  “Your dad has been raising this recently. Look: Aren’t the lines on its back unusual?”

  Liujin couldn’t see the black turtle well, either. She knew it was a turtle, but whenever she wanted to get a good look at it, dizziness overcame her and her eyes hurt. She’d better give up the idea. A bird chirped in the pavilion, though: oh, it was the long-life bird!

  “Your young friend has been chasing things all along. He wanted to catch hold of those things.”

  The maids stood at the dining room door and called the manager. The manager immediately walked toward them. As soon as he left, the long-life bird also disappeared. In the gloomy atmosphere, wave after wave of heat streamed over Liujin. Her clothing was immediately drenched in sweat. She walked out of the pavilion, intending to go back to her room for a shower.

  A black brick wall suddenly appeared at a corner. It was so long that it blocked her exit. At first, she walked left, but didn’t reach the end, so she returned to her starting point and walked right, but she still didn’t reach the end. She heard a bird twitter in the dark from the top of the wall. The new moon in the sky seemed to be quivering slightly in the heat. She decided to go back to the dining room so she wouldn’t get lost. However, Roy’s voice came from the other side of the black wall.

  “Liujin, there are a lot of people here. They all recognized me!”

  He seemed excited and happy.

  “Roy! Roy! Do you see me?”

  “Yes! You’re under the sun. The sun is on top of your head! I must hurry over there. There are people there. Over there is the heart of the Gobi . . .”

  When Liujin returned to the dining room, no one was there. Only a few white winged insects were flying below the lights. She wanted to go back to her room, because she couldn’t stand this drenched clothing. Just then, she saw her savior—the maid came over. She still looked somber.

  “Can’t you find your room? As soon as night falls here, everything changes. When I was new here, I could never find my room, either. Come with me.”

  They left the dining room, and the maid suddenly became extremely muscular. She pushed Liujin, and Liujin fell down. Liujin thought she would die and abandoned herself to despair. But she didn’t die. She dropped onto the bed in her own room. The window was still open, just as it was when she left. When she got up to close the window, she saw the manager standing outside it.

  “I’m looking for your friend. This boy—it’s as though he’s grown wings! I can definitely use someone like him here.”

  When Liujin awakened in the morning, she didn’t quite remember what had happened the night before. When she made the bed, she found she had crushed two insects to death. They looked a little like centipedes, but they weren’t. What were they? They were disgusting. She wrapped them in paper and threw them into the trash bin.

  The door to Roy’s room was closed. She walked over and knocked, and the door opened. It was the manager.

  “After your friend arrived here, he lost all sense of time. He talked with people all night long. He wouldn’t let anyone go. Some guests were so exhausted by this that they slept on the grass. Look, this is his hand!”

  The manager held up Roy’s sparkling hand and snickered in the dark. Liujin almost fainted.

  A long time passed before she asked, stuttering, “Is he dead?”

  “Don’t be silly. How could he die? He’s just temporarily dismembered. Didn’t you ever hear your father talk of this sort of thing? For example, my head . . .”

  He didn’t go on because Liujin’s legs had gone weak and she was sitting on the ground.

  “Are you all right? You’ll get used to this eventually. We’re too close to the sun here, so you might be reacting to that.”

  Clenching her teeth and holding onto the wall, Liujin stood up. Although everything had turned black in front of her, she felt her way back to her room.

  A male servant was cleaning her room. She sat on a sofa and heard him swatting the insects with slippers. He was enjoying this, but she felt nauseated.

  “Are you done yet? I’m going to throw up,” she said weakly.

  “It’s finished, it’s finished. I’m sorry!”

  When he passed Liujin, he bent down and said, “You’re pretty. Just now, I thought I’d like to leave one of my eyes here!”

  Liujin was too nauseated to eat breakfast. She walked slowly over to the window on the east and looked again at the courtyard. Roy was standing among some small trees in the courtyard. Liujin waved to him.

  “Roy! Roy! May I come over? Would that be okay?”

  “No! Absolutely not! Liujin, there’s an abyss below you!”

  Behind Roy was a dark shadow. Liujin saw that black shadow grip him like a gigantic bear, yet he didn’t struggle. Those small trees were swaying fiercely. Roy shouted, “Mama! Mama . . .”

  After a while, Liujin could no longer see them. Liujin felt comforted by thinking that, after all, Roy was now with his mother.

  Intending to check out, she walked to the entrance of the guest room area, and was again forced back by the burning sun. The worst part of it was that she couldn’t open her eyes. All of a sudden, she thought of Roy’s black umbrella. Where had he gotten it? The male servant emerged from a guest room. Liujin approached him to ask about checking out.

  “Yes, it’s about time for you to leave.” After a pause, he added, “But you can’t check out in the daytime. You know the sun is burning here. Wait until evening. Someone will escort you down.”

  Liujin was surprised. How did this person know that she should be checking out? Had Roy already left?

  When she returned to her room, the temperature suddenly soared again. Her head was covered with sweat. The fan didn’t help much. She took another cool shower. Then she emerged and heard a sharp whistle from outside. She pushed the window open and saw people standing in line in the burning sunshine. The manager was training them. He was still dressed in black. Only his face showed through: it was an ordinary farmer’s face. Liujin couldn’t look very long because she was dizzy. She thought, It was probably only after a period of training that people could become accustomed to the sunshine here. The last person she saw in that column was actually Sherman. He had changed a great deal: he was now much coarser—a lot like a farmer. Liujin closed the curtains and sat down on a chair. The shrill whistle outside surprised her.

  “Do you like it here?” the maid asked her.

  “Me? I don’t know. Why is it so close to the sun? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “It’s all because of the manager.”

  As she swept the room, she shook her head, as though she disapproved of this aspect of the management of the hostel. But Liujin thought this woman was the manager’s spy. She shouldn’t trust this woman.

  “I didn’t know the driver before. A friend recommended him to me,” Liujin said.

  “There are many people we don’t know, and yet they’ve known us for a long
time. Look, he’s here.”

  Liujin turned and, sure enough, the driver had arrived. He held a black hat in his hand—a big, tall hat. Who had such a large head? The maid was talking.

  “If you cover your head with the hat, you can go out.”

  She peremptorily put the hat on Liujin’s head and, gripping her arm, dragged her out.

  The cart was parked at the entrance. The two of them pushed Liujin in, and she felt the cart tear off at a high speed. Was it really flying in midair? She wanted to look from beneath the brim of the hat, but she was too afraid. As the driver sped along, he roared as if charging ahead in battle.

  Finally, the cart reached a flat road. Liujin heard Sherman speaking: “It feels so right to stay in the same hostel with Liujin.”

  She took off the hat and looked at the ashen-faced Sherman.

  “I arrived before you did. I’ve always wanted to be here. That manager used to be the head of the orphanage where I stayed. Wasn’t that fortunate?”

  They reentered the wasteland. Liujin didn’t feel like talking. She was immersed in a world of imagination that was filled with manors, and where shadows were everywhere. Liujin tried to imitate bird calls, and she really did make some sounds. Sherman looked at her in surprise. He felt he was drifting away from her. But sitting with her, observing her, was still exciting.

  “Look, this is your bag,” he said.

  “Oh, that was thoughtful of them.”

  Liujin cast a fleeting glance over the wasteland. She was wondering how many people in the world could approach the sun? Who did Pebble Town belong to?

  Chapter 13

  QIMING AND LIUJIN

  A bad thing happened yesterday evening. It happened just as your dad and I were about to sit down for a rest after we cleaned the kitchen. It’s the little black turtle your dad bought a month ago at the market. We raised it in a pot. It stayed there quietly and even grew a little. But yesterday it became jittery. Who knows how it climbed up to the windowsill—anyhow, it gnawed the curtains to bits. When your dad discovered this, it was about to jump down, so your dad nabbed it and placed it in the pot again. He covered it with a lid. It was so outraged that it snapped and scratched all night long, climbing up and falling down repeatedly, splashing the water and making a lot of noise.

  I turned on the light and saw cold sweat running down your dad’s forehead. He said weakly, “Could the turtle have come to ask for payment of a debt? I feel as if I’m dying.”

  I retorted loudly, “Nonsense!”

  “Then you just put the turtle back on the windowsill, okay?”

  And so I did, but it didn’t jump down. I went back to tell your dad, but he seemed thoroughly bored and didn’t want to hear any more.

  The two of us went downstairs before daybreak, intending to go to the bridge, but the streetlights were shrouded in fog. It was dark everywhere. We couldn’t see the road at all. Your dad stopped and asked if we should go on or not. I said of course we should. When we went to the frontier years ago, we couldn’t see the road clearly then, either. Since we couldn’t see the road, we just walked ahead. Sometimes we could tell we were walking on flat land, sometimes on rubble. Later, at daybreak, we found we had circled back to where we had started. We had gone nowhere.

  This letter from Mother made Liujin rather uneasy. She kept wondering: Was this the very turtle that the manager had shown her the other day?

  Three days ago, after a long absence, Qiming came again and sat at the entrance to the courtyard. He set two empty birdcages down in front of him. Liujin remembered something from the past that was connected with birds. Before she could grasp the memory, though, it faded again. She was dismayed: Why couldn’t she ever remember the times she had spent with Qiming? Through her recent chat with Amy, she knew this old man had been important to her while she was growing up, but she couldn’t recall anything specific. Oblivion was frightening. Were certain parts of her dying?

  When she left the room again at night, she noticed a wagtail now standing in each of the birdcages. The doors to the cages were open, and the birds stood quietly inside. Liujin thought the old man was really a magician, and in a flash, she remembered her dad’s black turtle. She was a little distracted.

  That night, Liujin tagged along with Uncle Qiming on his way to the market. She found out that he had lived all along in a small room next to the indoor market. Liujin stood at the entrance and heard the old man say from inside, “Liujin, how can you so thoroughly forget the past?”

  Liujin was really ashamed of herself and strode in. His birdcages were placed on the table, and the birds were sleeping despite the light. Uncle Qiming was fixing the spring of a toy duck. Liujin thought the duck looked familiar. Without knowing why, she blurted out, “Do you raise turtles?”

  “No,” he looked up at her for a moment and said, “Turtles are extremely spirited. If you raise a turtle, you shouldn’t leave it. Otherwise, your life will change.”

  Liujin glanced around the room. She saw a narrow bed, a low cupboard, and various birdcages, but all of these things were in the shadows. She couldn’t get a good look at them. She also heard a large clock chiming, but she couldn’t locate it. Was it under the bed? Now this old man was speaking clearly. Why had he garbled his words a while ago in her courtyard?

  “Have you always lived here?”

  “This is simply my temporary dwelling.”

  When Liujin left, he didn’t see her off, but continued making repairs. Liujin thought, That’s probably the toy duck I threw away. She had thrown away many things.

  Later, Liujin told Amy of her distress over losing her memory. Amy simply advised her not to tag along after Qiming, because he “was a person from the past era.” Liujin asked what this meant, and Amy looked into her eyes and said, “You’ll just be annoyed, because time can’t be reversed.”

  Then what was the barrier between her and this old man? Liujin remembered the “long-term” relationship her parents had with him, and felt he had the air of a relic. She admired Amy because she knew Amy could communicate with him. Amy said he had lived many years at the forestry station at the foot of the snow mountain. He hadn’t come to the city until recent years. He didn’t have a regular residence in town, but moved from one shabby place to another.

  Qiming felt that dreams were great when you were old. In his dreams, his desires were blurry, but easy to achieve. He was frequently pleasantly surprised. When he awakened, he would remember that he was retired and free of financial worries. He could do whatever he wanted. He appreciated the deceased old institute director so much. It was she who had given him a life of good fortune. The year he retired, he was curious about other ways of life. On an impulse, he went off to do odd jobs in the logging industry. He worked hard every day and felt enriched. But he left later because of a nightmare. Actually, he had never figured out whether it was a dream or reality. Back then, he and a fellow worker were resting on a slope. Someone’s shouting woke him up from his nap. He looked up: a big black thing came crashing down. He took off immediately, but quickly realized there was no place to hide: on the left was a cliff, on the right was a cliff. Was he in a gorge between cliffs? He heard a thundering sound. A large tree now lay spanning the gorge, its branches twitching wildly. His legs were shaking as he walked out into the open and saw his workmate smoking a cigarette.

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and cut down this tree. I was going to wake you up, and then I figured it wouldn’t hit you anyway, so it would be better to let you sleep,” he said apologetically.

  “I thought I was going to die just then. Being a lumberjack is scary.”

  He left that very night. Recalling it now, he felt a little regret: after all, he liked the mountain life, especially the forests at night. The trees in the breeze sounded like the soft murmurs of families—so many of them. But how had the incident with the tree occurred? At the time, he was resting on the mountain slope, and his workmate was a likable person. They had always been a good team. Later, Qi
ming had gone back and searched for that gorge, but couldn’t find it.

  He pitched a tent in the woods beside the road in the suburbs. No one stopped him from staying there. He felt relaxed and even helped someone dye cloth. It was only in the last two years that he had moved back to the city. Sometimes, he returned to his old home at the Design Institute, but most of the time, he simply lived wherever he could. The strange thing was that he could always find a small room to stay in: he found places with no trouble at all. Pebble Town was truly a paradise for vagrants. Old Yuan, the garbage collector, had said to him just yesterday, “Warehouses, tool sheds, basements—one can live in any of them. I came here five years ago, and I’ve never had to pay rent. And I also know of a hostel that doesn’t charge anything.” As for Qiming, he still didn’t know why he wanted to live only in these temporary places. Was it for those dreams? Each time he moved to a new place, he had very good dreams. He enjoyed these dreams very much.

  It was life at the Design Institute that had broadened his horizons, so when he left there, he felt full of energy and curiosity. His greatest feeling after retiring was a certain kind of harmony. When he went walking in the suburbs, no creatures were afraid of him—not the birds, not the beasts, not the fish. Sometimes they even approached him. One day when he was enjoying the breeze as he stood in the river, dozens of little fish swam up and rubbed against his legs. And the people—everyone he ran into—understood him very well and offered all kinds of help. During that time, Qiming often said to himself, “My life has only just begun!” He congratulated himself. When he worked at the forestry station, he often went to look at his former lover’s tomb. It was an unobtrusive hillock without even a tombstone. It was there that he began talking with Amy. He was resting on the grass next to the grave, and crows were hopping back and forth by his feet. Amy came over. She was still a young girl, maybe eighteen years old. Qiming saw a small brown snake hanging from her neck. She smiled at him as if they were old acquaintances.